The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm … - Nicholson Baker

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Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all. . . . as long as you tell the truth.

Nicholson Baker

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

People, Person, Talk, Things, Upset, Want

Same Author Quotes

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Healing, Left, Thinking, Woke, World

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

Book, Browsable, Electricity, Matter, Needs, Readable

I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.

Ask, Away, Factory, Grief, Night, Running

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.

Believe, Names, People, Self, Start, World

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

Book, Bookstores, Outlive, Persistence, Qualities, Quality